Lyrics are just poems set to music, right? Well, that's the tactic Kyle Alden, a San Francisco-based Irish musician, took when he wrote and recorded Songs from Yeats' Bee-Loud Glade.

The album is subtitled Thirteen Poems by W.B. Yeats Set to Music, which is a pretty exact description of what you'll find here.

The result ... works. This isn't a collection of songs that would have sounded current in Yeats' day. For the most part, the music sounds more American than Irish; it doesn't try to pretend to be anything else. But the music is a nice touch, wrapping the words in a warm embrace of guitar (Alden), fiddle (Athena Tergis), mandolin (Mike Marshall) and a few other instruments. Alden does all of the singing (except for some backing vocals), and there's no mistaking his voice for Irish, but it's a pleasant folk baritone nonetheless.

Yeats' Bee-Loud Glade is a surprising and imaginative reinvention of Yeats' timeless lines. (The "bee-loud glade," if you don't know the reference, is an image lifted from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," one of the poems featured on the album.)

This isn't something I expect to play often; it's not a folk style I tend to seek out. But I admire the concept and am impressed by the execution, and if it introduces a new audience to Yeats, all the better.

Still, I'd love to hear what some other musicians -- perhaps someone with more of an Irish flair -- could do with the same immortal lines.

[ visit Kyle Alden's website ]